Posted
by
Hemoson Monday April 04, 2005 @12:16PM
from the kicking-the-tires dept.

ThinSkin writes "Intel let ExtremeTech.com sneak behind the curtain of its anticipated Dual-Core Pentium Extreme Edition processor for a full performance preview with benchmarks. Bundled with essentially two Prescott cores on one die, the Extreme Edition 840 processor clocks at 3.2GHz and contains a beefed-up power management system to keep the CPUs running cool during use. Expect Intel's dual-core line to hit the streets sometime this quarter. No word on pricing yet."Update: 04/04 17:26 GMT by T: Timmus points out FiringSquad's preview, too, writing "The benchmark results are mixed, with a few applications taking advantage of the new CPU, and some that don't." And Kez writes in reference to this article to say: "Our article on HEXUS.net, covering the P4 EE in detail, states the price as £650 (that's what we're looking at in the UK anyway, not sure about the U.S.)."

with its advanced predictive branching and speculative execution, the processor will have several kernels with the most commonly used options compiled for you 0.25 seconds before you finish typing "make "

I love superlatives like 'Extreme' in a product name. It's so funny to look at, years later.
"Hey, remember this old clunker? It was 'EXTREME!'""Yeah, by today's standards it's EXTREMELY slow!""Only dual core, ha ha ha ha hah!"

I guess they can't very well call it 840i, as they've already used that for a chipset, but
maybe Intel should stick to names ending with -ium and -on instead of something which timelessly
proclaims some chunk of doped silicon as superior.

Next up from Intel, the Ultra-Spifftronic-Wowee-Zappo Triple Core, with extra schmaltz!

Somehow, Extremium and Extremon don't seem to have the same rhyme.
Next up from Intel, the Ultra-Spifftronic-Wowee-Zappo Triple Core, with extra schmaltz!
The local ice-cream van used to sell those during the Summer holidays - you had to eat them immediately, otherwise they would melt before you got inside.

Then they'll call it "ExtremeX!"
I feel bad for the engineers who come up with these designs which are then crapped on by their marketting department.

Which probably has a lot to do with the success of the Dilbert strip.

This morning, on the way in to work, the BBC World Service had another feature on managment (flavor-of-the-day) trends. I suppose marketting does the same thing, but nobody has actually put their finger on it, yet.

Worse yet, how many of those people that can truly benefit from the power that the Extreme Edition can offer, don't because of stigmas on the name? I recently was told a story about a guy that had a job offer but refused becuase he didn't fit the culture of the company: apparently every workstation had the latest, greatest gadget from the fancy fadish mice, to modded computer cases with the flashing neon lights. While those things looked cool, he didn't feel that he would fit in with a company that spent money on the cool stuff as opposed to spending money on development. I have to say that I feel the same way. When I am in the market for computing power, I am not interested in the fadish stuff -- I am interested in the raw numbers and if the computer can do what I need it to do. With names like "Extreme" your marketing to the gamers and not nessarily to the programing professional. The marketing departments should at least market a simular chip with simular abilities as a "Developer Edition." But I guess people that would be interested in them are the guys buying the Xeons and the Opertons.

Yes, but that barly pays for the student loans:)But seriously chip designers have to have knowledge of EE as well as quantum physics. The education requirements are extremly demanding, and there few in the world truly capable of doing the work. 120,000 a year is almost embarassingly low if you are talking about chip design.

It seems to me they'll need the power management to keep it from melting itself

Don't forget the 50 Gigawatt power supply!

The processor alone consumes (last I heard) about 100 watts and if it's essentially two processors in one, will require a really really good power supply. That means to use this proc, you'll instantly need 100 extra watts out of your power supply.

If they have to have power management to keep it from meltdown, just how much more computing CAN you get out of it anyway? To me the seco

we just call it what it is, a two-die module. This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package... Sure you'll only be using one socket but thats about the only different. Architectually, you will need to look at AMD's offerings for true dual-core.

we just call it what it is, a two-die module. This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package... Sure you'll only be using one socket but thats about the only different. Architectually, you will need to look at AMD's offerings for true dual-core.

Shush! You're taking the glimmer off the chrome, just as Intel, in a slap-dash manner, try to recapture some sort of legitimacy after getting spanked by AMD, right after totally dissing 64 bits.

So what you are saying is that AMD CPUs have more overhead due to cache coherency traffic on the point-to-point CPU links, whereas Intel CPUs don't generate cache cache coherency traffic except on invalid misses, since they can snoop the shared memory bus?
And perhaps you could clear up for me what the northbridge for a newer AMD CPU does. I thought the main function of the northbridge was the memory controller, which is included on die on newer AMD CPUs.

No, you got it backwards. The AMD cpus [as I understand it] have DEDICATED pipes to the other cpus. They're 8/16 bits wide and run at [forget but think it goes upto 1.6Ghz].

So cpu 2 and cpu 3 could talk and not get in the way of cpu 1 and the memory bus. Yes, there is "northbridge" for memory but there still is a memory bus. The Intel cpus have no dedicated bus and ALL talk over the same bus.

Not having either combo of boxes I can't tell you which is faster but usually AMD is much faster than Intel just on the pure "not being a Ghz pusher".

This is not true dual core but two cores slapped into one chip package...

Care to elaborate on the difference?

Typically what they mean is that Intel's design is not functionally different than having two distinct processors as you would in a typical SMP setup.If you look at the diagrams on the second page of the article, you'll see there's no direct communications between the two cores on die. If the two cores want to check cache coherency or system resouces access it's arbitrated over the sytem bus.AMD uses a 'System Request Interface' that all cores on a die will connect to. There's actually local communcations between the two cores. You don't have to hop onto the system bus (or HTT link in this case) to request something that's sitting right next to you. This really only works well since Opteron is a NUMA architecture to begin with, you don't have to go snooping around to see who else is using the data because unless the local SRI has 'checked it out' you have exclusive access, and you don't need to verify that.

It's totally irrelevant whether they are mounted on one silicon wafer or two.

I was under the impression that dual-core was two processors (two cores) mounted on one chip - i.e. one chip with two cores. Whereas what you referred to in your first post was called dual-processor, albeit also dual core.

And I'm pretty sure you aren't person of interest concerning processor design. This would be akin to me saying that HTTP really means hyper terminal turbo popper. I might work literally, but everybody knows I'm full of shit.

The literal definition of the phrase is difference than its widely-accepted meaning. Is that so hard to understand?

Instead of having to repeatedly say "two processor cores on a single processor die," someone coined the term 'dual-core.'

dual core and smp are like apples and oranges. two cpus are two cpus.. the OS sees them and uses them as it does other resources. dual core the OS does not see, the cpu employs the two cores to execute more pipelines in parallel. a car with two engines is not the same as two cars.

Please, stop posting. You know absolutely fuck all about what you're talking about, and you're adding even more mis-information to this article.

I would also like to say that I don't know anything about AMD's offering of dual-core, so I can't comment on why their way is better. I'm sure it is, because AMD's way is always better, but I don't actually have proof of that.

That comment pretty much says it all about your experience in this field.

A die is a term for a discrete piece of silicon. My understanding is that both cores are on the same piece of silicon, even if they don't share anything other than power and FSB connections. I would say that it is a single die module.

You are correct. A "two die module" would
have two separate pieces of silicon, interconnected
through one of several techniques.

But this is/., where you're supposed to cheer for
AMD and mock everything Intel ever does.
Just remember this, and you can get lots of 'Informative'
mod points, even if you don't understand even the
most basic terms of chip manufacturing. At
least that's what I can figure by looking at what
gets modded up around here.

No, in that they provide two entirely distinct functions in the computer. With out dragging on too much, take the simple example of upgrades. I, myself, have upgraded my GPU twice since my last processor upgrade - not including the new graphics card I bought along with it orginally. Do you expect me to buy a new CPU every time I want improved graphics performance?

There may be a niche market for this, handheld devices and the likes, but not for the general computing market.

Isn't there also a dual-core PowerPC/G5 in the works? I think it hasn't been announced officially, but it seems to have been accidentally confirmed by
IBM [theregister.co.uk] and by Apple [theregister.co.uk] as well.

Dual core is two cores on a single die. Intel's solution may not be optimal by any measure, but to call it not "true" dual core is simply AMD apologists trying to live down not being the first out the gate with one. Yes, AMD's solution is much better (in my opinion and others) and it will be the one that I buy, but you cannot dismiss Intel's chips simply because they hurt your pride.

Intel is just playing catch-up now to AMD. With AMD's 64-bit architecture being chosen by the market over Intel's shoddy architecture, Intel is ahead only in name-recognition. As the article says, AMD has been working on their dual-core offering for a year longer than Intel. AMD is a year ahead in development. Their offering is likely to be much more robust than Intel's with that extra year.

But, who knows? Intel seems to be shipping first. And we all know, Real Artists Ship.

I think Intel's decision to leave out extensions developed by AMD are going to kill to processor fairly quickly. Granted they bought the rights to them from AMD, but their must be some royalty type deal here, because Intel is only including a handful of them. That will make their processor increasingly incompatable with the already accepted AMD architecture. Why is Intel so grudging to admit they are behind? They are going to kill themselves with that attitude. A couple more processor iterations and fai

Here is the exact filed text of the ten year licensing agreement you are refering to. Intel AMD cross licensing agreement [findlaw.com] Nowhere is there any legal languague in it that covers future developments. That would be a really stupid business move on anyone's part.

The real story here is what caused Intel to agree to a license agreement to begin with. They actually were caught with their pants down on this one. They had reverse engineered everything and attempted to move forward with their reverse enginee

Agreed, but one additional point I need to make that you brought up. Intel has already lost their spot with Microsoft. Windows XP was written for the AMD processor, not the Intel cores. Microsoft actually had to go back and 'patch' their software to make it work properly with the current line of Intel processors. The new version of Windows, yet to be officially named, is also written around the AMD instruction set.

Thanks for naming the instruction sets that I mentioned. I could not remember the nam

You don't seem to understand... Intel isn't selling dual core chips either - they are selling chips with two normal P4 dies on them, which are now forced to share I/O bandwidth from a single socket. These dies are also very underclocked (3.2 GHZ) compared to the standard P4, which comes in at around 3.8 GHZ now. Another tidbit of info for you - the new dual core P4s won't be compatible with a majority of Intel boards on the market... not even bios updates can correct a lot of the existing boards out there

Sigh... I'll say it again, Intel is NOT shipping true dual core chips. They slapped 2 dies onto one package. And if you understand manufacturing, it's much more expensive to do this, and Intel would not do this in large volume without charging a massive amount of cash for each chip. And by the way, when you say shipping, can you show where you can currently purchase one of these chips? I didn't think so. It's called a paper launch, and Intel, Nvidia, ATI, and AMD are all notorious for using them. Intel

If you had read TFA, you'd know that Intel is NOT shipping the 840 EE yet. What the sites that posted TFAs received were generic boxes containing sneak previews of a chip that will most likely ship in a few months.

How is this informative?? The dual core chip Intel is shipping (smithfield) IS one die, with 2 cores. Actually, this is inferior to MCM packages with 2 dies, as it is difficult to get 2 cores side-by-side with equal performance/power. And yield goes down when you have to have a single large die.

Re: sharing I/O bandwidth. Intel has to do this because they don't have a built-in MCH. It has *nothing* to do with "selling chips with 2 normal P4 dies on them".

Re: Amd's offering. AMD doesn't have to change their design because they have a MCH onboard. That's why the number of pins can remain the same. On the flip side, if you change memory type, you'll have to throw away the chip. It's called engineering tradeoffs, and both companies do it.

Arrgh... practically every point in the above post is misleading or wrong, and it get's modded to +5.

I'll concede that point to you - that Intel is now putting 2 cores on a die... however they were never engineered to work that way initially. They only have an 800 MHZ FSB, not 1066 like the newer P4's, so they have even less bandwidth to share. Want a source?? Here:

"Re: sharing I/O bandwidth. Intel has to do this because they don't have a built-in MCH. It has *nothing* to do with "selling chips with 2 normal P4 dies on them"."

It has EVERYTHING to do with having 2 P4 cores in a single package - look at that anand article I posted above, here is a quote from it:

"The major issue with Intel's approach to dual core designs is that the dual cores must contest with one another for bandwidth across Intel's 64-bit NetBurst FSB. To make matters worse, the x-series line of dual core CPUs are currently only slated for use with an 800MHz FSB, instead of Intel's soon to be announced 1066MHz FSB. The reduction in bandwidth will hurt performance scalability and we continue to wonder why Intel is reluctant to transition more of their CPUs to the 1066MHz FSB, especially the dual core chips that definitely need it.

With only a 64-bit FSB running at 800MHz, a single x40 processor will only have 6.4GB/s of bandwidth to the rest of the system. Now that 6.4GB/s is fine for a single CPU, but an x40 with two cores the bandwidth requirements go up significantly."

If I wanted to build a Windows system for gaming, would I have to buy Windows XP Pro for multiprocessor support...or is this dual core configuration invisible to the OS, meaning I could get away with XP Home for $100 less.

No, Microsoft has said several times that hyperthreaded CPU's, along with multi-core ones will only be considered a single unit by the OS. So with XP home and a dual core chip, you are fine, just as XP pro users are with a pair of dual core chips.

You can get OEM versions of XP Pro for as little as $125. I'd buy Pro over Home, even if I had a single CPU. Too many times I have gone to do something on a Home box (which I was able to do all day long on Pro), only to find out, "What do you mean I can't do that?!?!"

I could be wrong, but I don't believe there is a version of Windows compiled for dual processors.

Instead, you will see performance gains when running mutliple applications. With even one app, it will allow multiple threads (ones for the OS and ones for the App) to run simultaneously, giving you a boost. Running more than one app or running apps compiled with multi-threading in mind will show a performance boost no matter what Windows version you are running.

It looks like gamers won't be all that interested in this offering. Even once games support mutli-threading, this wont end up boosting their framerate much. Instead this will raise the lower framerate and give them smoother gameplay. While this is a great improvement unfortunately most gamers seem only interested in their max fps and not the minimum. However for workstations this will be great, lower cost than dual procescors means graphics design companies and advertising agencies can get their job done quicker and more efficiently.

You're right on the money there. If there's one very disturbing trend in the retail computer market it is the reliance on gaming for sales. I browse computer shops all the time and the other day my wife was with my just to kill some time before catching the subway.
We walked into a computer shot and a sales guy jumped on us in no time. We let him show us around and do his schtick for a bit and then I asked him why they didn't have any machines slower than 1Ghz for my wife who just browses the web but mai

The reason they don't make 1 GHz CPUs is because they would never sell enough of them for proportionally-lower pricing to make sense. Chip manufacturing is full of sweet spots. This is why Mini-ITX boards with the slower Centaur processors are actually significantly more expensive than commodity Intel/AMD boards. They amount to a low-volume niche product with no economies of scale to speak of, so you won't save any money just because you're buying a slower CPU. Y

...contains a beefed-up power management system to keep the CPUs running cool during use

So in other words... unless you have extreme cooling this thing will never run at full speed for long. Because when it does, it will quickly heat up and this power management will throttle the clock speed and core voltage. Apps may start up a little faster, but long-term consumers of CPU cycles (e.g media encoding, some games, etc) won't see much improvement. But I'm sure lots of clueless consumers will go for this new eXtreme CPU. Can't wait to see what bullshit analogy Intel will come up with for the TV ads...

Yeah, the "insightful" mod always puzzled me. It gets overused a lot and I'm sure most of the moderators don't really know the meaning of the word. IMHO, "interesting" should be used in place of "instightful" in most situations.

Back on topic, one pentium 4 EE is hot enough, so two must be really hot. Everyone knows the P4 is hot, just ask anyone on slashdot!;)

Why do we have dual cores? Everybody's admitted they are going to be prohibitively expensive, so is it just for show? Let's see some AFFORDABLE dual cores before we start heralding them as the future of processors.

Excuse me if this sounds unusually stupid at Slashdot, but they will in other words release 3.2 GHz dual core models initially? Won't they then have developed a new technology just to hit problematic clock frequency spoken of at ~4 GHz almost immediately? I was always thinking of something like two 1.6 GHz cores possibly with some tricks to achieve similar speeds as a current 3.2 GHz P4... Am I missing something here or is this just an unusually short term solution?

It's more like a short term flop in my eyes. With this Dual core bearly beating a slightly fast clocked single core procesor in only a small handful of tests coupled with it's extremely high cost, it's dead before it even hits the streets. People are not going to spend 2 or 3 times the amount of cash for that kind of performance. It's just not going to happen.

I agree that the expectation is double the core, double the power. This test processor is dismal in that regard. I guess we will all have to

The review is useless without comparing their test box to an Opteron dually. Since the details regarding how AMD is going to implement dual core is well known, they could take an existing AMD dually, and hobble it with a slower hypertransport setting which would give a pretty accurate simulation.

This lack of comparison indirectly tells me that AMD's dual core solution is going to wipe the floor with Intel's, even more so than the current AMD performance advantage over Intel on single core procs.

I wonder how big a gun Intel put to their head. I also wonder how much AMD is pissed off at being "scooped", when they've been working at this for a much longer time.

Listen, for office productivity and "how fast can I open spreadsheets", nobody SHOULD need more than one CPU.

The rendering tests were a little disappointing (I seem to recall a bigger gap in the AMD benchmarks), but really the point of dual CPU's is, as anyone who has used one knows, responsiveness.

Yeah rendering times dropping to 60% of normal is nice, but let me tell you, where a normal single CPU system would sit there gurgling and choking on its own vomit because some dirty little application decides it MUST use up all the CPU time, dual CPU systems just go "eh, whatever, hes being a jerk, I can help you over here."

It is SO nice to use a dual CPU system in daily routine useage (which for me is QUITE varied) just for the increase in responsiveness alone.

Multi-processor systems, which includes multi-core, and AFAIK, hyper-threading, need an OS which will reasonably distribute tasks across computing resources. Under DOS...er, Windows, this seems to be the app's responsibilty, since the article refered to "threaded applications, such as 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Premiere.". I know that Perl (ActiveState) doesn't have thread support under Windows. I haven't tried it under Linux.

If the application only has one active segment of code in memory...it doesn't matter how many processors there are, if there's only one unit to actually execute.

Multithreaded applications spawn off multiple segments of executable code in memory to do different things...a network scanner that operates in a multithreaded model might spin off a thread for every few hundred connections, so it can handle more in parallel.

"Multithreaded" applications are built to parallelize easily, as each thread can hit a different physical CPU. Single-threaded applications will also benefit from multiple CPUs/cores, but less directly: a single-threaded app would have less resource contention on a multiple CPU system, vs a single CPU system.

The OS scheduler is the deciding factor for what-goes-where and there's some hefty math involved for a lot of it...most of that, however, is handled automatically and transparently (although you can "force" affinity to CPUs if you're so inclined.)

even the Extreme Edition dual core CPU only has an 800MHz effective FSB, not 1066MHz

It doesn't make much sense to put two processors on the same bus, and then lower the bus speed. And, as the benchmarks showed, single-threaded applications ran slower on the dual-core processor than on the regular P4

I understand "dual core" has a certain market appeal - much like faster clock speeds. Never mind the fact that bus bandwidth and hard drive speed have a greater overall effect on system performance.

Those who want dual cores would be better off buying a computer that was designed to support multiple cpu's - for example, a UNIX workstation. It doesn't matter how many cores you put on a chip if your memory bus can't feed them:

An P4 can theoretically execute 2 instructions every clock cycle.

Make that 4 instructions/clock for a dual core.

Each instruction averages 4 bytes of data access. Since we'll consider the instructions to be cached, we'll ignore the memory access for them, for now. So we're up to 16 bytes of throughput per clock cycle.

At 3200 MHz, times 16 bytes/clock, we're up to 51,200 MB/s theoretical throughput.

Granted, 6.4 GB/s is very fast - But even a single core P4 can saturate the memory bus. What point is there in adding another core (aside from marketing hoopla), when the bus can't run fast enough to support it!

It seems to me that Intel added the power management features to the chip because they knew that the second core was going to be idle most of the time.

BTW, this is why the Opterons have on-chip memory controllers. Then your aggregate memory bandwidth scales with the number of CPUs (assuming your OS is suitably NUMA-aware) and you can sidestep this problem. (More or less. A memory hog processes could start stealing bandwidth from the other CPUs if its working set doesn't all fit in one CPUs memory bank.)